Night sky

This past month, my mother took me and my lady to the
Hayden Planetary in New York City, a place I probably
haven't been to for over thirty years. The first time I
went there was around when I was in first or second grade.
I had no idea what a planetarium
even was,1 but by the end of the day I was
thoroughly in love with astronomy -- as I still am today.

Over the years my mother nurtured that love. She got me
a telescope, and a star atlas, and countless books on
astronomy and astrophysics, and (of course) she brought me
to many, many more planetarium shows and space museums over
the years.

So this year I wanted to honor the connection between
mothers and the heavens.

The moon is the closest heavenly body to Earth, and as
moons go (in this solar system, at least) it's unusually
large compared to the planet it's orbiting. Its gravity is
so strong that 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of ocean water
bulges under its influence, causing the tides. It circles
the earth every 28 days. During this time it always shows
the same face to us: we call this phenomenon tidal
lock.

The Greek word for moon is mene, from which we get
the Latin word menses meaning "month"; and from that
we get the word "menstruation". Some believe that the
28-day human menstrual cycle has its origins in the
clockwork phases of the moon -- that somehow, long ago, women
became "tidal locked" to the moon. I wanted to capture that
relationship.

So this year's card shows the moon as the rounded pregnant
belly of the Roman goddess Luna. The space-time grid behind
Luna represents the moon's gravitational influence, but the
red color is meant to suggest
inner space, and the gravity well nearby holds not a
planet but an unfertilized human ovum.

Above the red ovum
are alchemical symbols which represent the intricate process of
creation. Reading from left to right, the ones shown are:
abstraction, calcination, cementation (two variants),
coagulation (ditto), composition (ditto), and digestion.
It's a happy coincidence that this sequence starts with
something that looks like an Alpha and ends with something
that looks like a combined Alpha and Omega -- those two
letters representing the divine forces of creation and
destruction.

In the upper left, within nested representations of the
moon's phases and depictions of the planetary orbits, that
same ovum is now fertilized and about to divide in two.
Where the grid below emphasizes space, the orbits above
are meant to suggest time.

Behind Luna, stretching out to the right of the canvas, is a
stellar nursery, a place where new stars and planets are
even now being born.

Behind her head is a celestial crown made not of
moonbeams but of pulsar coordinates which show her (and our)
location in the Universe. This is a portion of
the plaque we sent
out on the Pioneer 10 space probe, as part of our search
for intelligent life in outer space. When the plaque was
scaled to this size, its diagram of the solar system fell at
Luna's thigh level. The hollow disk on her left thigh is
Earth (the location of the moon, of course), and the line
leading off to the right is the trajectory of Pioneer 10.
Another invisible synchronicity: where the center of the Sun
would be on the plaque, there is the center of the red
ovum and its gravity well -- approximately the right size
and texture for a star.

And as with the Pioneer 10 probe, there is a message of
greetings -- if you know where to look.

As usual, I used
the GIMP for the digital
editing, and my Wacom tablet. A small amount of work was done
in Inkscape, which is the
Linux analogue to Adobe Illustrator. Season 4 of "House, MD" was
playing in the background. I always put on "House" when I do
anatomically-inspired artwork.

I started with Luna -- her upper half, anyway. She began as
a stock photo I found on the web,
licensed under Creative Commons (AS0000001F20, "Pregnancy",
by Anthea Sieveking, courtesy of
Wellcome Images)
The woman had exactly the
look I wanted: full round belly, good placement of hands,
and contemplative expression. To give her an unearthly glow
I simply made the digital-negative image and played with the
color until everything was in the cool end of the spectrum.
Unfortunately the source image was small and the
enlargement showed artifacts, so rather than make
corrections I went the other way. I slightly blurred the
image, autotraced it to 32 hues (kind of like posterizing
but you get resizable curves), and then superimposed the
photo with the approximation.

Still, her face bothered me. Digital negatives of faces
look really, really wrong. We're cognitively wired to read
subtle cues in facial contours, based on natural lighting
and shadows. So for the final draft I brought her face back in
as a color positive, albeit with a cold color scheme and
with much of the contrast removed to give her a soft glow.

Luna's lower half is actually from
a woodcut of the Venus De
Milo from a Dover disc of clipart. Yes, it's
astoundingly appropriate that I used a statue of Venus in a
fertility piece. No, I am not that subtly clever -- the
dress just worked very well, at least once I resized it.
To subtly unify Luna's upper and lower halves I brought
some background color from her upper half to the lower, and
added some woodcut-like accents to the upper.

The colors needed to suggest both the cold moon and the warm
human body, so I chose a palette that went from a warm blue
(top) through violet (right) and eventually to a cool red
(bottom). I played with a few different nebula photos and
happily found one I could use without any color correction.
The greenish-black of space in the middle-left was a
fortunate accident, but both the ova and the grid needed to be
seriously colorized to get the effect I wanted.

The transition from face to garment was too harsh,
so I overlayed both blue and red versions of her
dress as mostly-transparent layers, then faded in those
hues to match the ambient light where it made sense.

Finally: God, but her belly put me through hell. I
wanted to use an actual moon there, but every time I did it
no longer looked like she was pregnant -- instead, she
looked like a woman carrying a moon in front of her. For
the initial version I added a few more folds of fabric and
settled for an echo of the space-time grid. It worked well
enough, but looked vaguely like a basketball. For the final
version I just got rid of it. Sometimes you just have to
let go of your original vision or the final piece suffers
for it.

1 I vaguely recall that it was with a class trip,
and I remember someone telling me, "We're going to the
plantarium tomorrow." It sounded like a cross
between plant and terrarium -- I swear I thought
we were going to some kind of big greenhouse. I was thoroughly
prepared to be bored out of my skull.